Member Spotlight: Colleen Morton Busch

Why is writing important to you and why do you think it’s an important medium for the world? Writing and thinking and feeling are all interwoven. Writing allows us to pause, reflect, question, explore, and more deeply and thoroughly experience our lives. It connects us with our fellow human beings and the world around us. Writers across the globe and history have put their lives on the line for the freedom to write because it’s so important, so essential to being human.

What are your tried and tested remedies to cure writer’s block? I don’t really believe in writer’s block! I do believe we can get in our way if we’re too worried about success and failure, or whether or not a work will find a publisher. Those sorts of concerns are not good fuel for writing. I’ve learned to accept that there are fallow periods in a writing life, times when I need to rest my writing muscles. I trust that the impulse to write will return when it’s time, and it always does. On a practical level, when I want to write but don’t seem to be able to, I give myself permission to write badly, just lean right into it; I read writers I admire, for encouragement and inspiration; or I go for a long walk or bike ride. Getting outdoors and into my body is a sure way to get out of (or at least less trapped in) my head. If there’s such a thing as writer’s block, that is where it lives: in the worried, perseverating, doubting mind.

What is your favorite time to write? From early morning until about midday.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received and would like to impart to other writers? Annie Dillard in The Writing Life: “Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case.” I discovered this quote while getting my MFA in poetry. That was more than 30 years ago, and I still remember and cherish it.

What excites you most about being a writer in today’s age? It’s a frightening time for writers–with multiple threats to our flourishing: corporate consolidation, diminishing attention spans, unregulated AI. It’s a frightening time for humanity. But because of these threats, being a writer in today’s age is critical work. We have to keep writing so that human creativity doesn’t vanish. So we don’t lose touch with the beauty and mystery of life. So we can advocate for the earth and all of the beings that live on it. So we can spread hope and insist on truth. Some days writing feels like trying to keep the last living animal of a species on the verge of extinction. But I’ll keep writing. Like my editor for my first book Fire Monks, the late Ann Godoff, I believe that human beings will always love and need stories. Whether in fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, stories bind us to one another and to the world.

Colleen Morton Busch’s Smolder is out now with Ex Ophidia Press.